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Friday, April 30, 2010

Reposting: This weekend Geocaching is marking its 10th Anniversary. There are now over 1 million active geocaches worldwide!

Arlington has 100s of geocaches that abound in its parks, urban settings, and sometimes hidden right in front of you.

Today, on the way home from dropping the kid off at school, I found "Death of a Nazi." The cache marks the spot of the 1967 killing of George Lincoln Rockwell, up near Upton Hill Regional Park. The cache itself is a small hidden container. It's GPS coordinates are loaded into the geocaching.com website - where participants can download them to their GPS devices. Along with the coordinates, the person who creates the cache frequently tells a story of why the location is significant. In this case, it was Mr. Rockwell's death. The description for this cache describes the events of that day:

At noon on Friday, August 25th 1967, Rockwell drove from his headquarters to the laundromat in the Dominion Hills shopping center across the street (now a shoe repair store)....

Follow the link above to read the rest of the story.

Geocaching is an excellent opportunity to be outdoors, get to know neighborhoods, or go for a hike. The Boy Scouts added a new merit badge for Geocaching this year. And Northern Virginia has its own Geocaching club. Members of the club regularly volunteer to give classes for those interested in starting this hobby.

bArlington, bunkum from Arlington is written by Robert Cannon, a 20 year resident of Arlington and a lifetime resident of the Greater Washington Area. rcannon100 (~) yahoo.com Robert Cannon also runs Cybertelecom.